It’s finally (pun intended) the end of the semester! I’m excited to relax at home, do nothing and not feel guilty about it (as opposed to during finals week…), make Christmas cookies, and connect with family and friends again.

I decided to take this opportunity to review my semester and tell you about my classes. This semester, I took 17 credit hours—freshman survey plus sixteen hours.

Math 1152 (Calculus II): This class is pretty difficult by nature, but it was even harder for me because I never really clicked with the professor. It might have been his teaching style or perhaps because of the 8 am lecture, but I could never get much out of class. However, my TA for this class was THE BEST (shout-out to Joel!) and he made some difficult material a lot easier to understand. Lesson learned: GO TO RECITATION!

Chem 1220 (General Chemistry 2): My professor for this class was really nice and made an effort to try to get to know us even though there were 200-300 people in each of her lectures. She walked around and talked to us during class and always wanted us to come to her really chill office hours.

For the lab portion of this class, the experiments and lab atmosphere weren’t too different from what I’d experienced in AP Chem. However, some pre-labs and post-labs were online and the paper post-labs that we turned in had specific formatting and guidelines. It took me a few weeks to get used to all the paperwork.

English 2280H (The English Bible): I enrolled in this class because it was the only honors English class that opened up and also fit into my schedule, but I really enjoyed it. We went through almost all of the Bible in detail. I learned a lot about ancient and Jewish cultures as well as themes that run through the entire Bible. It was refreshing to look at it through historical, literary, and cultural perspectives, which added to my understanding of the Bible in a religious context.

English 2367.04H (Technology and Science in the U.S. Experience): This summer, I obsessively checked BuckeyeLink while waiting for a spot in this class to open up. I’m really glad I fought to get in, even though it’s just my second writing gen ed. My prof was awesome and I got to know my classmates pretty well, which made class fun. We discussed issues related to science and technology (the food industry, genetic engineering, HeLa cells, urban planning) and explored different kinds of rhetoric as they related to the complexity of the technological issues. We wrote in multiple genres—movie reviews, blog posts, informal essays, research papers. I would highly recommend this class, especially for science majors.

For my research paper, I investigated publicly available personal information (PAPI) as propagated through social media. Basically, I got to Facebook-creep on some people in the name of research. However, there’s a lot more to it than that, and if you want to learn more about online privacy, how companies like Google and Facebook are using your information in ads, or how easy it is to construct someone’s life from information found on their Facebook, I highly encourage you to (SHAMELESS PLUG!) read my paper, which can be found here.

During my first semester at Ohio State, I got to experience a ton of new and exciting things with new friends, learned a lot, and have a lot of amazing opportunities open up for me for next semester and beyond [little cliff-hanger there ;)] I hope you have a great and relaxing Christmas break. Go Bucks!